Refurbishing Buildings (or, Yet More Fool's Errand)

I've been playing around with two new techniques in scratch-building houses for gaming terrain.  One is the slightly maddening but also meditative application of individual 1cm square "chipboard" cardboard shingles (chipboard being similar to the backboard of a notepad).  Previously, I would cut a strip of chipboard as wide as my roof, and cut very narrow wedges to suggest individual shingles. When these were layered and offset, the end result looked the part. 

Individual 1 cm square shingles, however, create a very striking effect and are totally worth the effort. A key trick is to stop after you've glued a row or two and use a wet brush to break up any globs of glue that are visible. After an initial coat of paint, a drybrush in a lighter color really makes the roof visually pop.  Since we as gamers always have a bird's eye view of the table, having these distinctive rooftops really improves the table experience.

The other technique is plastering the foamcore walls of the building with DAP-brand joint compound.  I apply with a craft stick, being careful around doors and windows. After this dries, I sand it flat and remove any obvious directional drag marks that my applicator stick left.  Then I apply a layer of PVA (wood glue) over all the plastered surfaces, dampening the brush as needed to get a better spread.  This gives the joint compound some additional durability.  Since my terrain is basically for the late medieval or early modern periods, I do a base coat of white acrylic and then a wash in a medium brown, which I then dab off the excess with cotton balls.

A new old house.

The four walls of the above house have now been refurbished twice. The original dated back to 2017 or so and the only texture was small squares of card glued on for random brick effect.  Its actually part of the larger compound to the right in the below picture of an early Italian Wars game.

I separated the house from the rest of the compound and covered the original walls in texture paste and painted an antique white.  For the current refurbishment, I sliced the bricks off with an old kitchen knife before applying joint compound to the entire building.

A Reaper Miniatures wizard for scale.

I also made it so the roof is removable, and added a floor at the top so that units can easily be understood to be in or moving through the building.

I then repeated the same process for these two buildings.  They are meant to be more Mediterranean because they have a less pitched roof and a terracotta color to their roof shingles. These were in tough shape as I used model railroading plastic sheet with a tile pattern for the roofs, which were not very durable for gaming.   

I don't know why I made the windows so small!

To better facilitate units moving through the buildings, they also now have removable rooftops.

Here's all three of the refurbished buildings together.